


Sitting On A Windowsill

by sottovoce81



Series: Impossible Missions Force: Project S.H.I.E.L.D. [1]
Category: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Feeling Writers Write Feels...!, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Someone Needs A Hug!, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-08 00:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sottovoce81/pseuds/sottovoce81
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coulson comes home to find Clint sitting on that damned windowsill again...</p>
<p>--<br/>“I told Ethan,” Clint said in a low voice, breaking the silence that had built up.</p>
<p>Coulson’s heart clenched, but he kept his face neutral.  “How did he take it?”</p>
<p>Clint’s head was already shaking.  “’How did he’—?  I thought that—“  He paused to clench his jaw so hard that it must have been painful.  “You would have told me—if you had known, you would have told me—right?”<br/>--</p>
<p>(Takes place directly after the events of Ghost Protocol, and several months before The Avengers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sitting On A Windowsill

**Author's Note:**

> Was anyone else pissed at the end of MI4 for Jeremy Renner's character!? (Or was it just me and my sister?) I wanted to smack Ethan Hunt in the face. Because of the failed mission in Croatia, Brandt quit field-work altogether! He thought he failed, and it broke him. To have Ethan just tell him it was all a lie some year and a half later, it just...rawr! I wanted to cuddle Brandt! And since in my head!cannon, Brandt = Hawkeye, I wanted Coulson to cuddle him, goshdarnit! So that's what I wrote here! Post movie, Brandt needed a hug and some serious thinking time. So this is what I've given him.

Agent Phil Coulson quietly let himself into the apartment, immediately noting how _wrong_ it felt.  He paused.

There was a slight scratch on the keyhole.  The lights were all off, including the small light he always left on over the stove.  He could hear the TV quietly playing in the living room, but couldn’t make out what was on.  Then he registered the sounds of the city coming from an open window.

Coulson sighed as he closed the door, placing his keys, wallet, and briefcase on the small table by the door.  He traced his way through the apartment, pausing momentarily by the kitchen table to see the spread of newspaper clippings from a foreign country, a single case file that had been illegally copied and saved, and the photographs that went with it.

A grimace.

He hurried past the living room, not bothering to turn the television off, and made his way to the bedroom in the back.  He stopped in the doorway to give the man full warning.

“Clint?” he asked quietly.

“I’m here,” a voice sighed in response.

Coulson pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped inside, heart already beating wildly in his chest, because he knew where he would see Clint.  The man was sitting on the sill of their open window, on the fifth floor of the apartment complex.  Coulson felt a familiar and irrepressible lurch in his gut at the sight of Clint sitting there in that way.

He was a grown man, but he pretended to be a cat, balancing on the tiny windowsill, his back against one side, the toes of his shoes shoved up against the other.  It didn’t really help that Coulson knew in the back of his mind that Clint had a perfect sense of balance, or that he could easily catch himself on the windowsill if he began to tip over.  It didn’t even help that Coulson knew that there was a few inches of a ledge two feet under the window, should his worst nightmare actually come true one day.

It didn’t help, because even if Clint was physically stable (or as stable as he would get in this position) he was not mentally all right.  He only ever sat there when he was so upset that he didn’t know what to do with himself.  When he was at the end of his list of options.

 "What happened?” Coulson asked softly, carefully making his way over to the window, avoiding the smashed glass on the carpet.

 “Croatia was doomed from the beginning,” Clint mumbled in response, not looking at him.  He shifted in his seat, and Coulson caught sight of the glass in his hand that must have replaced the smashed one on the floor.  He wouldn’t have admitted how nervous it made him to know that Clint had been sitting on the ledge alone, drinking.  It would have done no good anyway, since this wasn’t the first time it had happened.  The man had a good head with alcohol, but when his memories of Croatia mixed with the substance, he drank more than alcoholics consumed in an entire week.

 Coulson stood by the window, and dropped a hand on Clint’s ankle as casually as he could.  Clint finally looked at him, and quirked a sarcastic eyebrow in his direction for the obvious show of nerves.  Coulson shrugged though, knowing full-well he was acting within reason.

 “I knew you were going to see Ethan Hunt tonight,” Coulson admitted, rubbing his thumb lightly against the man’s ankle.  “Tried to call you, but I was still off the grid.”

Clint snorted at that, but not with any humor.  His eyes darkened, and he looked out the window again.  “It wouldn't have changed anything that happened between him and me.”

“I know.”

They stayed in silence for a long moment, Clint staring out the window at the city, and Coulson watching him.  Coulson was patient.  He could wait for answers to come.  He just needed to know what he was supposed to do.  He couldn’t fix Clint until he knew what had happened.

He had a vague idea of what must have happened.  Clint had always felt guilty about Croatia, though he had only been following his orders.  To have been faced with Ethan Hunt now, even after all the months Clint had spent putting himself back together, it would have been awful for him.

They hadn’t yet been together when Clint took the job in Croatia.  Sure, they had been interested in each other, and had danced around one another, but Clint had never been quite ready to commit himself to any relationship before it, and Coulson didn’t want to risk his job.  Then, after...well, Coulson would never forget how broken Clint looked when he came back.  When he swore that he was done working in the field and that they had ‘better damn well find a new position for him to fill before he went back to his old life.’

And of course, since letting him go back would have been sentencing him to prison for the rest of his life, Coulson had talked to the Secretary of Defense and found a new position for Clint.  But when Coulson had gone to check on him, he had found Clint sitting on his windowsill, on the eighteenth floor of his hotel, glass of brandy in his hand, so drunk he was slurring.

It had scared him then too, though whether worse or less than every time since, he couldn’t tell.  He knew better what to expect when Clint acted like this now, but he was also a hell of a lot more invested.

He had pulled Clint out of the window, and had used a few moves he learned in the Marines to keep the man down once he had wrestled him to the floor.  Then he proceeded to ream him out for trying to commit suicide.  Clint had laughed brokenly at the time, saying that if he had only thought of it sooner, he might have jumped, but he hadn’t even had it in mind.

Then Clint had kissed him.

Coulson had been upset at first.  He didn’t want to just be a distraction from the pain.  He wouldn’t be a fling.  So he had curbed the whole thing at that first kiss.

But Clint was apparently hooked from that point.  And Coulson couldn’t really trust anyone else to keep an eye on the beaten-down agent who always seemed to give people the slip, and possibly had a death-wish.  So he had dragged Clint out of the hotel and to his own apartment.  And though Clint tried several times in that first week, he didn’t let Clint take their relationship any farther than it had already been stretched.  (Though he couldn’t help but allow a few more kisses.  He was only human.)

It had taken two weeks to get Clint back to acting like himself.  It had taken the IMF four weeks to finish debriefing Agent William Brandt (as Clint’s alias stood) on Croatia, and to finish setting him up in his new office, working as an intelligence gatherer for the Secretary.  It had taken almost two months of Clint showing up every night at Coulson’s apartment for him to tell the man to just start bringing his stuff over.

A week later, Clint finally convinced Coulson that he didn’t want him as a distraction, but as a partner.

From there, their relationship progressed quickly to a state of which that Coulson could not share with his superiors.  It had eventually come out that they were together, but well...Clint had promised him that bathroom-stall sex was the best way to fix a terrible day at work.  And Coulson was pretty convinced afterwards, even though he found out that afternoon about the hidden cameras that had been added in every room of the IMF building...from his boss’s boss...who was not pleased by the display of Clint and Coulson’s relationship that had been emailed to him from security early that afternoon.

Still, other than a bit of a slap on the back of the hand, his superiors couldn’t really punish Coulson or Clint all that much.  They were both too valuable, especially with their contributions to the brand new branch of IMF that was being formed.  They were in head positions in the organization and running of S.H.I.E.L.D. and since it was a secret from even most of their country’s top agents in the IMF, well, the government needed to keep Clint and Coulson both on the project.

But they were warned that, should their relationship _ever_ interfere with a mission, both of their asses would be on the line.  No one had said a word about their relationship ever since.  And so, they had continued living together, and building their lives together, ever since.

They had gotten married four months ago, though very few people knew about that.

They had been all right in these past fifteen months since Croatia.  They both had their work to drag them away from home too often.  And both had off days, or bad days, or attempted-assassination days that threw them for a loop.  But they were happy for the most part.  Last week, Coulson had been held hostage by terrorists.  This week, Clint was sitting on the damned windowsill again, like he had the three other times the memories of Croatia or his past had gotten too bad to handle.

But they would get through it, just like always.  They had to.

“I told Ethan,” Clint said in a low voice, breaking the silence that had built up.

Coulson’s heart clenched, but he kept his face neutral.  “How did he take it?”

Clint’s head was already shaking.  “’How did he’—?  I thought that—“  He paused to clench his jaw so hard that it must have been painful.  “You would have told me—if you had known, you would have told me—right?”

And suddenly he was turning those big, heartbroken eyes on Coulson, begging him for some promise that Coulson didn’t know how to make.

“What are you talking about, Clint?  What should I have known?”

He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his one free hand to his forehead.  “I can’t—  I’m not supposed to—  But if you knew,” he whispered.  “If you knew and you didn’t tell me...”

Coulson gripped his ankle more tightly.  “Clint, you’re not making any sense.  What are you trying to ask me?”

Clint leaned his head back against the side of the windowsill, studying him with eyes that wouldn’t miss anything in his expression.  Coulson only hoped that Clint found whatever he was looking for, because he wasn’t quite sure what he was showing.

Clint swallowed nervously, as if he were second-guessing himself, but he didn’t look away, and neither did Coulson.

“Did you know that Julia Hunt is alive?”

Coulson felt his blood run cold.  “What?”

Clint huffed some horrible attempt at a laugh.  It came out strangled and painful.  “She’s freaking _alive_.  Ethan faked it all.  Decided she couldn’t ever be safe if they were together.”

“But you saw the body.  He killed those Serbians.”

Clint shrugged.  “I saw pieces of somebody...or something.  And he killed them to get her back.”

“But he was arrested,” Coulson argued, still confused and off-balance.  “He was in there for all this time.  Where would he have left her during that time?  And why didn’t the Secretary—”

“The Secretary,” Clint interrupted, his voice hard and bitter, “used his attack on the Serbians as an excuse to get him into that prison.  He was sent to get information.  To gather intel.  The Secretary was the only one who knew she was alive, that was Ethan’s only clause on taking the mission—no one could know she had survived.”

Coulson closed his eyes and let out a deep breath, deflating.  “I didn’t know,” he promised quietly.  He opened his eyes to find Clint still watching him.  “If I had known, I would have told you.  Even if the Secretary had ordered me not to, I would have made sure you knew.  Please, you have to believe that.”

One side of Clint’s mouth tipped up in a tired smile.  “You never say ‘please’ unless you mean it...”

And suddenly he couldn’t stand the distance he was keeping from Clint.  Coulson let go of his ankle to grab the man’s waist and pull him back inside.  Mercifully, Clint allowed the change in positions.  So Coulson took the glass from his hand and left it sitting on the windowsill.  Then he pulled Clint over to the bed and wrapped himself around his husband.

Clint sighed into his collarbone.  “It changed everything,” he mumbled.

“I know,” Coulson whispered.  He rubbed his thumb against the back of Clint’s neck.

“I haven’t worked in the field since.  Not ‘til Ethan came back.”

Coulson didn’t know how to reply to that.  Croatia had changed the entire course of Clint’s career and life.  It wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Clint admitted quietly, sounding way too vulnerable for Coulson’s liking.

“Do you really have to decide right now?” he asked, dropping a kiss on the top of the man’s head.

“He offered me a job...”

“Hunt?”

“Yeah,” Clint sighed.  “It sounds interesting, but...I told him I’d have to think about it.”

“When do you have to let him know?”

“I have twenty-four hours.”

Coulson nodded slightly.  Then he pressed another kiss to the top of Clint’s head.  “What do you want?  Do you want back in the field?”

Clint moved back a few inches, so that he could look Coulson in the eye.  “I think I...I miss it.  A little bit.  But I’ve been out so long that...”

“You won’t be rusty,” Coulson guessed.

“I’m not sure it will ever be the same though.”

Coulson understood.  “It won’t,” he acknowledged the truth, running his thumb against Clint’s neck again.  “You’ll always carry this with you.  But you are not your past; I think you of all people should know that by now.  We aren’t doomed to repeat what we’ve done before.”

Clint sighed and moved back to where he had been, his face pressed up against Coulson’s neck.  “I guess....”

Coulson didn’t press the issue, though he wanted to.  Instead, he simply held Clint, running his fingers lightly against his neck, his back, and through his hair, until the man fell asleep.

He knew they would wake uncomfortably.  He was still in his suit, and Clint was in jeans.  And they were both lying on top of all the covers.  But at the moment, none of that mattered more than Coulson’s need to hold his husband close.

Croatia had come damned close to breaking the man.  Clint had finally begun putting it behind him, but then _this_ had to happen.  He had to find out a new truth about it all that made him go and tempt his fate yet again on the windowsill.

Coulson glared hard at the glass still sitting on their window’s ledge.  He pulled Clint a little closer at the thought of what could have happened if he hadn’t gotten there soon enough.  Both today and that first time so many months ago.  If he had never gone to check on Clint at the hotel...

Coulson shuddered.  Clint mumbled something, grabbing a fistful of his suit jacket, and Coulson forced himself to still.

If he hadn’t have pulled Clint from the windowsill at the hotel, he might have never let Clint kiss him.  If it hadn’t been for the kiss, he might have never let the man follow him back home even after he was declared mentally fit to live on his own again by the IMF counselors.  And if that hadn’t happened, they might never have gotten together, and might never have ended up married.

 Coulson pressed a kiss against Clint’s brow.  Because he could.

His mind was still running at full-speed.  He was furious with the Secretary for his decision to not tell Clint the truth.  He was worried about what Clint would decide to do in relation to Ethan’s offer—agreeing would mean that Clint was out in the field again, in danger’s way, but turning him down would mean that Clint was still feeling too broken to go back to the kind of work that he was really meant to do.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Clint mumbled against his neck.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” Coulson said in response, trying to hide the smile from his voice.

“Can’t,” Clint argued.  “You’re brain’s too loud.”

Coulson chuckled at that, but he tried to quit worrying, because Clint had asked him to.  He let himself relax, and focus on the fact that Clint was here now, safe in his arms, and that they were both okay.  Slowly, he felt himself dropping off.  But Clint’s voice stopped him just as he was on the edge.

“I want to do the job,” Clint admitted in a low voice, almost as if he wasn’t sure it was worth waking Coulson up if he was already asleep.

So Coulson asked, “Where is it?”

“Russia,” Clint said.  “Thanks to all the stuff with the Kremlin, another little issue’s come to light.  They want Ethan to get a team together and stop an up-and-coming threat.”

Coulson thought about it for a moment, debating answers to the problem.  After a moment, he knew what he could do.  “There’s an informant that the IMF needs to meet with in Russia.  I’ll offer to go with the Director to see him.  Then if you need anything, I’ll be around.”

Clint rolled back to look him in the eye again.  “You would do that?  I mean, I shouldn’t need a babysitter just to go into the field but—”

Coulson cut him off.  “I’m not your babysitter, I’m your husband.  This will be your first job back in the field after a really bad mission.  I’m sure you’ll do great, but if there’s anything that you need, even just a voice on the phone to break the monotony of Ethan Hunt wreaking havoc on the IMF’s dime, then I will be there.”

Clint stared at him for a moment, then surged forward for a bruising kiss.  “God, how did I ever end up getting you?” he mumbled when he broke away.

Coulson smiled.  “I imagine it was about the same way that I ended up winning you.”

“I’m hardly a thing to be won,” Clint mumbled embarrassedly.  It just made Coulson smile wider.

“That’s what you think, but I say differently.  I won you, and I plan on never losing you.”  He sealed that promise with another kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm totally working on a larger story that will span all of that flashback Coulson had, of the first time he found Clint sitting on a windowsill at the hotel to when they get married! So far I only have one part (of eighteen...?) done, but eventually I'll get it up here. :D
> 
> (Cross-posts are available at my LJ and Dreamwidth of the same username.)


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